Indoctrination-3SongRoughCut from Darryl Miller on Vimeo.-Dark One : Feature Length Experimental Documentary, 88 minutesDirector/Producer: Darryl Miller Executive Producer: Elaine PainProduction Company:Ice Cube Factory, Cupar, Saskatchewan-Nominated2007for Best Canadian Feature Documentary at Hot Docs(the biggest North American feature documentary festival).1743 entries. 129 films were screened.-Selected 2007 for the official program of 50th edition of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film.DOK Leipzig is the largest German and one of the leading international festivals for artistic documentary and animated films.Out of a record 2,600 entries, only 120 animated and 190 documentary films will be screened.Dark One- was in consideration forCanada's Top Ten2007by theToronto International Film Festival Group (TIFFG). Canada's Top Tenpromotes and celebrates Canadian cinema through an annual initiative whereby some of this country's leading experts in Canadian cinema (film critics, academics and industry professionals) select the best Canadian films of the year. 100 films were in consideration.-The International Documentary Film Festival Jihlava has requestedDark One be part of the new Documentary Film Center's archive in Prague, to be studied by students at FAMU,and viewed by journalists, film professionals and the public. Jihlava discovers authorial documentary film, and follows it's traditional motto of THINKING THROUGH FILM.FAMU is one of oldest film schools in Europe.New York Times Review Summary - Mark Deming, All Movie GuideDan Biholar is a poet and spiritual seeker who came of age in the Western Canadian city of Regina during the late 1970's. One of Biholar's greatest creative influences was William S. Burroughs, and unfortunately Biholar absorbed his appetite for drugs as well as his distinctive literary style. In the 21st Century, Biholar is still writing, but his life has become caught up in a downward spiral of drug abuse; he's addicted to opiates, and is looked after by his aging mother, a holocaust survivor who is struggling with her own emotional issues. Despite it all, Biholar is still searching for a spiritual redemption that will free him from his thirst for drugs and allow his muse to take him to new places. Darryl Miller is a filmmaker who was close friends with Biholar when they were both teenagers, and has fought his own battle against chemical dependency; Miller revisits his old friend Biholar in the documentary Dark One, and paints a vivid portrait of a soul in crisis and an artist struggling against the bonds that hold him back (only one of which happens to be drugs). Dark One received its world premiere at Toronto's 2007 Hot Docs International Film Festival.http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/395705/Dark-One/overviewScreenings:-World Premieres: Hot Docs International Documentary Festival(Co-presented with The Images Festival)-April 20th,2007 Bloor Cinema, Toronto - 11:30 PM-April 22nd,2007 Innis Town Hall, Toronto - 8:45 PM-Sept 13,2007 Regina Public Library - 9:00 PM-Sept 14,2007 Regina Public Library - 7:00 PM-Oct 31,2007 "naTo" National Front Theater - 10:15 PM DOK Leipzig-Nov 2,2007 Filmeck Theater - 02:00 PM DOK Leipzig, Germany-Nov 10,2008 University Of Regina-Film 250 Lecture + ScreeningDARK ONE - Leipzig Summary
Dan Biholar sits at the kitchen table preparing his next 'shot' with a teaspoon and a lighter. While doing so he argues with his mother who survived the Holocaust, but still has to deal with death on a daily basis thanks to her son. In the background a parrot is dismantling a gas cooker and dropping pieces of metal noisily to the ground. A stranded family's everyday madness, that Dan uses morphine to escape from. Images merge and visions of decay and death take him on his trip to a different dimension. Dan is followed by his friend, the filmmaker Darryl Miller, who captures Dan's hallucinations and transforms the gloomy poetry of the addict into a hypnotic, visual and auditory trip that can only be created by someone who has experienced these abysses himself. Miller has been working on his disturbing film for nine years. A film that dissolves genre borders in a surreal way. In the end he succeeds in finding access to a hurt and desperate soul, threatening to burn on it's quest for spiritual salvation.Who Is Dan Biholar?Dan is a poet,a drug addict, searching for spiritual enlightenment, spiraling into oblivion. Many documentaries on drug addiction present one dimensional cardboard characters with no interest in anything except their next fix, stereotypically drunken, homeless, skid row bums.Any complexities in their lives as multi-faceted individuals are reduced to a safe distance from our own almost acceptable make believe middle class lives.They are the hopeless.There is no salvation.We remain safe, pure, and exempt because there can be no possible connection between us.We can judge, but not understand or participate.Dark One is NOT one of those documentaries.I met Dan over 20 years ago, in our late teens.Dan was a poet.I was a musician. We were both experimenting with drugs.My interest was LSD, MDA, Coke and whatever else I could get. Dan got into morphine and other hard core drugs.We were both on a spiritual quest.I became heavily addicted to these mind expanding drugs and started having bizarre hallucinations, seeing spirits and experimenting with telepathy.I became delusional like Dan is(at times).Six years later I sought help and went to Detox and treatment twice.The spirits went away.I directed my energy to my music and finally a film degree.I have remained a friend of both Dan and his mother Helen.In the late 90's ,I started a soundscape/poetry project incorporating Dan's words and my music.During the project.I realized that the concept could be better utilized in film. The result is the 88 minute film "Dark One", and 45 minute audio soundscape CD , also called “Dark One”.Both works feed off and augment the other and will be sold together as one package.Check out the MP3 link...Dan at a young age modeled himself after William Burroughs, and now regrets it.Dan's poetry and voice quality reflect this influence. His voice is hypnotic and often has an unearthly tone to it, like a bad dream. Not only has his poetry taken on a stream of consciousness style, but his whole life, moving from concise idea to literary roughness that is often brutally honest to a fault, and often crude and uncultured.His experiences, stories, memories constantly alter with each telling.There are however consistent themes that weave in and out and form his life and this documentary on his life. William Burroughs, poetry and artwork, the quest for spirituality, his addiction are the most obvious.However his family, friends and search for love and acceptance are also critical.His treatment, by the establishment, as represented by the police and lawyers etc.has further molded his attitudes, demonstrating the hypocrisy of those in power. As a result of an institutional tendency to hide problems, lock them away, instead of trying to help individuals or accept the true reality of living with a life situation.The prison experience has become more than personal.The legal taxation of drugs, alcohol and cigarettes versus personal use of drugs demonstrates to Dan and his mother a blatant double standard.Dan's mother, Helen, struggles with Dan's addiction lifestyle, and her own dark memories about her husband's alcoholism and her experiences in the Auschwitz concentration camp as a child.Lastly Dan's bird, a beloved member of the family, to Dan a symbol of freedom and unconditional love wanders about the kitchen, oblivious to everything but her toys and surrogate lover, a blue stuffed bunny...Dan constantly attempts to achieve freedom: from society, from drugs, and from himself.He has extreme moments of clarity and delusion.He has delusions of grandeur, thinking he can save the world, but then realizing he can't even save himself.He has been on the methadone program on and off, always getting kicked off due to abuse of the system.He has come to a belief that spirituality is his only means of redemption.Reading many controversial, religious and spiritual books, he has developed a personal and unique belief system that takes bits and pieces of different ideologies , mixing and remodeling them.Magic, demons and God co-exist in constant battle. "Dark One" explores Dan's life and enters the psychological time and space of addiction where reality is only a dream.~ Darryl Miller.Note: According to Dan, Mihi Baitse/Baitze, Helen Biholar's father, came from Leipzig to Romania in the early 1900s. Helen was born Sept 2, 1928. Helen's life experiences were often dark and quite complicated. Dan Biholar is the main focus of this film, and although we look briefly at interactions with his family, the film only looks skims the surface of Helen's past experiences during wartime. I collected much more material, but it would have altered the flow ,direction and duration of the film. I have uploaded 54 minutes of MP3s of Helen discussing here life and experiences hereBlog http://icecubefactory.blogspot.com/

Indoctrination Music in Progress

Indoctrination

Indoctrination coming soon to a theater near you....Music by The Qube.CockroachesDan Biholar Chris GavinDarryl Miller- a new sound and focus has begun- a new adventure to explore.THE QUBE IS COMING.Indoctrination-a 3 CD Spoken word / soundscape adventure and Experimental Feature Film exploring intelligent design, the evolution of man's spirituality and his compassion for humanity, while destroying himself and the world due to character flaws. A drug addicted street poet's musings on man's role, human nature, self examination and spirituality warped through perceptions of mass media, art and literature. In the end, the truth of events becomes secondary to our perception of these events, and the world we live in.

DOK Leipzig Short Write Up

Dark One - Darryl Miller, Canada 2007, 88 minThe son a morphine addict, the mother a Holocaust survivor. The madness of a family on a hypnotic trip with Australian parrot.

HotDocs Summary

A drug-addicted poet searches for spiritual redemption as he cooks up morphine at the kitchen table with his Auschwitz survivor mother and pet bird. This brilliant, hallucinatory immersion into the psyche of Dan Biholar, a soul spiraling into oblivion, pushes the medium of the moving image about as far as it can go. Biholar vacillates between moments of acute self-awareness, disturbing darkness, tender sentiment, lyrical inspiration and delusions of grandeur. Award-winning experimental filmmaker and sound designer Darryl Miller was once in Biholar's shoes. With unsettling accuracy, Miller sculpts a sensory overload of hypnotic soundscape and half-melted psychedelic imagery that submerges us in Biholar's altered states. There is no safe distance from which to observe this visceral blurring between art, psychosis and reality-let's hope our sanity returns when the lights come back on.

DARK ONE INTERVIEW – GG interview with Darryl Miller
GG: With Dark One, you've created some beautifully sophisticated visual effects times with an intricate and powerful soundscape that, for many who watch it, it feels as if they experience, rather than simply observe, what your main subject Dan Biholar goes through. Did you do this intentionally, or did it happen organically?
DM: This film does not promote drugs...but it does very effectively enter the mind of an addict...It allows people not on drugs to experience an altered state experience like being on some drugs. When you are a drug addict, it feels as if the world is melting. Reality is just one option... one path among many. The memories from my hard drug days are burnt into my brain and I have been trying to recreate the experience on film and more recently digital video since I was a student at the University of Regina. This film gave me an opportunity to explore these techniques in a much more controlled environment using recent computer and software advances. I realised that I could enter the mind of my subject, rather than just observing... Of course this is only my perspective of what I think Dan could be feeling or experiencing at the time, based on my own past experiences with the same issues. I could enter Dan's head (a scary place at times) and allow the spectator to experience the situations in the film. Some of this is done by framing, extreme close-ups, and multi layer transparency effects and various melting filters in the Programs Boris Effects and After Effects.
GG: How did this mind-altering film come to be?
DM: I started working on a poetry/soundscape project with Dan. During this process, crazy things were happening over at Dan's. I decided that I would document some of the proceedings (it was always a spectacle of some sort or another). I was very surprised at the footage that I shot. I couldn't believe what Dan and his mother were doing and saying, and decided to make a film about the poetry project and Dan's life. The Saskatchewan Arts Board had helped with the funding for the audio cd and I decided to apply to The Canada Council for a grant based on my footage and poetry/soundscape work. After trying a few different technical approaches, I started working with Adobe Premiere and Adobe AfferEffects using variations of the multitudes of free Photoshop plugins on the web. Halfway through the video shoot I discovered that my Cannon L1 Hi8 camera I had been using started having problems.... This was after I transferred everything with time code to video, and it all looked great, I thought the camera just needed a little maintenance...I was wrong...They fixed the alignment and now all my footage to that point had a massive tracking problem. Here is where computers came in extremely handy. By re-photographing some of the footage, cropping, filters, and some creative editing.... I was able to rescue most of the footage that I knew would never occur again in a million years.... In fact, I liked the look that had been achieved on those scenes and went to work matching unaffected footage to match. I've had to make do my whole life using obsolete equipment and found a way to make it work (it always takes time though).
GG: Documentary filmmakers always have to negotiate boundaries, but as someone who was once addicted to drugs, how did you keep your distance from Dan's addiction and his dark delusions?
DM: It was very difficult to deal with both of these issues. As I am a recovering addict, the cravings are always there. One nice thing is I could at least escape out to the country with my wife and dog. We live in Cupar where there are no temptations ... ok ... very few I am aware of. As for the dark delusions...this was my second dilemma. I'm not so sure that all of them are delusions, and they may indeed be based in some sort of reality and or dimension that we as human beings can sometimes tap into when reaching or achieving different states of consciousness and awareness. Some of the delusions are just that... delusions inspired and caused by extreme morphine and drug withdrawal. But some of them...
At a very young age I had a number of what you would call paranormal or just plain freaky experiences that I have explained as spiritual in nature and also quite disturbing, All of this occurred with the use of drugs or alcohol. In one of my fairly Christian phases in my life, I experienced the shadow creatures (referred to many times in the film) in my friend’s basement. It was quite traumatic and definitely left it's mark on me. It's true what they say..."when you cross the line, it's hard to get back". I could write a book about what I think it all means and what happened but we're here to talk about Dark One. Later in my life (in late teen years and early 20's) I experienced the shadow creatures again. Unfortunately, in this time of my life I was heavy into Pot, LSD, MDA, Coke, Booze (You name it-including shooting), and was very unprepared to deal with the creatures since some of my faith and conviction had been stripped away by the drugs. Doing research on the subject and talking to others with similar experiences, I came to a conclusion that some of this stuff has got to be real but intangible and almost impossible to prove .I read somewhere that hundreds of thousands have experienced similar things... especially under the influence of drugs. Problem is...the longer you do drugs , the more your brain deteriorates...I'm quite crazy now also...But... I may have gotten into drugs + booze because of the many odd and strange (hallucinations) I experienced long before I got into drugs.... I believe drugs can open your mind enough to allow you to see things that are around us all the time (think of it as another dimension, that most people refuse to acknowledge exists).... problem is drugs are addicting and eventually warp these perceptions.... probably better to be a Buddhist monk or something.... The spiritual aspect of life is important and many concepts many addicts struggle with in this regard...do have some merit.... I believe there is a God, a devil, angels, and spirits...I've seen them! Back to the film.... how did this affect me personally while shooting and editing...let's just say I'm on antidepressants now. No demons lately.
GG: Do you have any advice for the audience who is coming to see your film?
DM: Be prepared. Some of the images are intense, disturbing, and not for the faint of heart. Just try to melt into the experience and not think too much about everything that is said or done. There is a lot of information to absorb and many levels of meaning. I'm still noticing some and I've worked on this for over 9 years. I guess that's what the DVD will be good for...You may not want to watch it again, but you might have to watch it a few times to get most of the concepts, ideas, and underlining meanings, The film is as much about some of my experiences as well as Dan's thoughts and experiences, among other things. Just remember.... It’s not real.... Or is it?

Gisèle Gordon-Hot Docs 2007 Canadian Programer

We thought it was truly brilliant, the first time I watched all the way through and the second, when I dropped more deeply into it. You’ve truly exploited the plasticity of the medium in a way that makes absolute sense for this film. I felt that tingly feeling that you get every few years when you connect with a truly great work of art.

In Dark One, Regina filmmaker Darryl Miller fuses the story of drug-addicted poet Dan Bilohar with experimental filmaking to create a 'documentary' that's difficult to describe: a mezmerizing soundscape laced with poetry, hallucinations and the poet's day-to-day life with his Holocaust-survivor mother and his pet bird. With the help of his wife Elaine Pain, Miller spent 9 years making the film, and the attention to imaginative detail shows us why. A former addict before he went to film school, he explained at the screening that he wanted to recreate what it was like to be high on hard drugs-- unless you've been there, it's difficult to say whether he succeeded-- -- but it's a wild trip, and a unique experience you won't soon forget.

Hospital Delusions

Dan Biholar Review In Retrospect Feb 12 2008

IT HAS TAKEN ME THIS LONG TO UNRAVEL THE INTENSE RESPONSE TO A MOVIE, A FILM THAT POSSESSES THE POWER TO PUSH ONE'S PERCEPTION TO IT'S SEEMING LIMITS ONLY TO BE EMOTIONALLY TOUCHED IN WAYS THAT AREUNEXPECTED AS MUCH OF THE FILM IS. FILM NOIR CANNOT CAPTURE THE VARIABLES THAT COME TOGETHER TO PRO DUCE A FILM THAT WILL MAKE YOU FEE....L,THAT WILL MOVE YOU IN WAYS THAT ARE FUNNY AS WELL AS TERRIFYING TO AWE STRUCK WONDER AS MY MOM [R.I.P-1928-2006.]TELLS OF LIFE IN A NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMP,A BEAUTIFUL YOUNG GIRL SURROUNDED BY DEATH,AND HER SUSTAINING COURAGE[SHE IS DEFINITELY THE 'HEROINE',AS I AM MUCH THE ANTI HERO AT THE HEART OF IT IT IS A RELATIVE CELEBRATION OF LIFE IN ALL IT'S FORMS AND POTENTIAL RELATIONSHIPS... A WONDERFUL STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESSMASTERFULLY EXECUTED AND ILLUSTRATEDFROM CONCEPTION TO PRESENTATION,A FILM DEFINITELY AHEAD OF IT'S TIME;TODAY'S ENIGMA ; TOMORROWS MASTER,AND I KN OW THAT THERE IS MORE TO COME FROM THESE VISIONARIES. DAN BIHOLAR

Boobaloo and the bunny

"Gestorben wird uberall" in "Tageszeitung"-translated

Documentary Film Festival Leipzig-Death is everywhere

Strange was felt, as the time passed, even with the opening of the 50thFestival for documentary and animation film in Leipzig. The pathos is gone, with the documentary many years in the political opening speeches and celebrated his truthfulness of the alleged hostile, alienating awareness against industry.It is factual and has become fairly mundane problems encountered: "After years of cost increases for stagnating budget, we can what has been achieved with existing resources no longer hold," says Festival Director Claas Danielsen. An exhibition and an extensive retrospective wisdom recalled the ambivalent GDR history of the festival. Initially, the oldest documentary film festival in the world.The animal Heinz Sielmann won one of the first prizes. Ideological be hardened to times of the Cold War. There were strange alliances at the end of the sixties, when West German filmmakers as "Jimi Hendrix at Altamont" konspirativ to Leipzig brought. The pragmatism with which Claas Danielsen for a few years, but the festival also as a meeting point position, first met some of the head. But not only the steadily increasing audience figures, but also the industry representatives give him right. It seems to me the festival, whose guest I since the mid-90s bin, a wonderful system in which serious films from all over the world, filmmakers, guests, audience and organizers six days intensively over the world and communicate with each other representation. This system works so well because the festival is manageable.The history of seeing films evolves, half chance, as in a good conversation. I was comfortable with the Canadian filmmaker Darryl Miller and came into the conversation because we both of which suffered so badly to be tightened. His jogging pants were dirty, because he is on the verge of a Czech film festival had been hijacked; I had made inattention to the way he was dressed. So we came into the conversation, and I was then in his film "Dark One." This is a difficult psychedelic film on the level of technology. It is about the morphine addicted poet Dan Bilohar, with his mother, who was in Auschwitz, and it is about the reality shock of the story of the mother, the hallucinatory Künstlichkeiten interrupt. Everything is infected by Miller's own drug history; Exhausting, sometimes blurred documentary, partly radically psychedelic. On the sidelines pitchforks, a small bird peaks repeatedly at small tin bowls, kitchen cabinet in black and white.Through Miller's film, I was on a dark track came in the eight-minute film "Jean Paul" by Francesco Uboldi dies. He was a man from his family and from his village in Cameroon violated.The filmmaker learns randomly from the story, which a lot of superstition has to do, and is to a tree geketteten man and brought filming. The face of the dying looks beautiful. Four hours after the shots dies Jean Paul.They threw the filmmaker, not to have helped; He replied credible that he would have had no chance.It was a matter of him gone, somehow, the dying to give a memento; He also that in a shocking settings, as the insects to sore joints of dying eat, have renounced. Also in the 100-minute, very impressive documentation of the British pioneer of Reality TV, Paul Watson, two people die. "Rain in my heart" accompanied four patients an alcohol withdrawal Station.The scenes are hardly bearable, in which the filmmaker patients in their recovery cases films; The position of director is shaky. For the woman whose husband just died, the accompanying camera friend. The film leads drastically the Dysfunktionalität the state health system in mind. In "Nothing to be scared of" Malgorzata Szumowska, however, almost serenely from the dying speech. Old masurische farmers sit on benches in front of their houses and tell how to help dying on their last journey, how to handle corpses bypasses. Embedded in traditions and rural communities of death still seems quite naturally to belong to life without terror.Of course gabs also different: the new, beautiful films by Gerd Kroske, Hartmut Bitomsky, Volker Koepp or Thomas Heise. Wunderbar was Sandra Prechtels and Sascha Hilperts portrait of a large, GDR in disgrace fallen Radsportlers, "Sports Lötzsch friend," and the simply wonderful debut film director of the Romanian Adina Pintilie, "Dont get me wrong." He plays in the psychiatric hospital. Two of the heroes are schizophrenic. One, a graceful, polite Lord, has the ability to deal with God to entertain; The other is convinced that rain to stop. Every day, the two on the grounds of the psychiatric hospital and quarrel with the utmost politeness: "Do not get me wrong, but...." DETLEF KUHLBRODT

Leader-Post Press Thursday, April 19, 2007(Mark Claxton)

Film hits close to home
Two longtime friends who have lived the highs and horrors of drug addiction now find themselves on opposite ends of a camera lens in a Saskatchewan-made feature film set to premiere at the Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Festival in Toronto.
Independent filmmaker and former Regina resident Darryl Miller was invited to the festival after organizers viewed his 88-minute documentary Dark One, which immerses the viewer in the mind and daily existence of Dan Biholar, a writer of poetry who continues to inject himself with morphine even as his mind and body suffer the ravages of the drug's effects.
Featuring stark computer-generated visual effects and readings of Biholar's poetry set to sound and music, the film follows its protagonist by weaving in and out of a hallucinatory world. Beginning its story through the eyes of Biholar's mother, a woman who survived Auschwitz only to watch his long, slow spiral into disintegration, the film then explores Biholar's cycles of lucidity and delusion as he seeks redemption in religious, spiritual and philosophical writings -- between hits of his drug of choice and interactions with his beloved pet bird.
"It comes in and out of reality," said director Miller in a telephone interview from his home in Cupar. "It's like you're doing drugs, without having to do drugs."
During a recent production session, one editor told Miller that in this film, 'reality is the effect.'
"He said, 'There's so much craziness, when you go back to reality, that's the shocking part,' " Miller recalled.
While Miller wrote, directed and produced the film, his wife and longtime filmmaking partner Elaine Pain served as executive producer.
"When this film began nine years ago, I didn't have grey hair and I had my own teeth," Pain said in a written statement for media. "Life has not been normal since."
For Miller, the completion of Dark One has been an obsession and odyssey that has left him emotionally and physically exhausted. A recovering addict who still deals with occasional cravings himself, he has spent innumerable days in the company of his friend, watching Biholar's drug-induced trances and --- perhaps more painfully -- filming his moments of clear-eyed awareness, regret and scarred wisdom.
"It's been a hard one to make," he said.
Initially, Miller intended only to produce CDs that would marry his friend's poetry to his own musical compositions. Eventually, however, "I decided to shoot some stuff, and all this dramatic footage started happening," he said. "Nine years later, here we are."
The project was also helped along by the relatively recent advent of digital film technology and editing software.
"Part of the problem was putting visuals to it, because it was so abstract," Miller said. "With computers now, you can do it."
On Friday, Miller will sit in the darkened Bloor Cinema in Toronto with other festival participants and watch his harrowing vision come to life on the big screen. His excitement and nervousness are apparent even as he ventures one candid opinion.I hope nobody goes (to the premiere) stoned. That would be a problem. This thing is intense enough when you're straight."
Miller is in discussions with the Regina Public Library regarding a potential screening of Dark One in September. By then, it's possible the film's promotional material could bill it as a winner of the Hot Docs Best Canadian Film category. While he hopes for the film's successful reception, he has higher hopes yet for Biholar, his friend of 20 years.
"He's drywalling now and he has some writing he wants to do," Miller said. "If he could get off that stuff, he would be quite brilliant."This addiction thing. It's a bitch."